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- What's missing from this simplistic analogy for entanglement? Does this correctly guide intuition, of not, why not?
Here's a simple story. I'm running a pizza delivery store and hit upon a gimmick to increase sales, I call it "Schrodiners Slice". You call up and get paired up with the next caller and your orders are randomly shuffled. Maybe you get your order, but maybe you get the next persons order instead. Alice rings up and orders a Pepperoni and Bob calls in and orders a Margarita. The boxes are identical so I take the two, shuffle them so that I don't know which is which. They are now "entangled", once you know the flavour of one you'd know the flavour of the other instantly, regardless of how far away the second box is at the time.
The orders are delivered and Alice measures the flavour of her order by opening the box, revealing the piping hot Margarita. She knows instantly that Bob has the Pepperoni.
So, my questions is, is this a reasonable analogy for entanglement, but using everyday macroscopic objects, and therefore demonstrating that entanglement is about knowledge of the observer, rather than there being some fundamental physical process "the collapse of the wavefunction" that happens upon observations? Or, maybe this is a flawed and misleading explanation that missing some key ingredient of what makes quantum entanglement fundamentally different from this classical and macroscopic scenario. I think vaguely there's something about Bell's inequality that is relevant here, but can't make it work with the analogy (i.e. add some extra details that show that the quantum version is weirder than just lazy Pizza order fulfilment).
I'm asking for understanding. I studied all this years ago, although Quantum was never my speciality. I'm getting back into thinking about this stuff via Sean Carroll's book on Many Worlds and I'm trying to wrap my head around the concepts again.
The orders are delivered and Alice measures the flavour of her order by opening the box, revealing the piping hot Margarita. She knows instantly that Bob has the Pepperoni.
So, my questions is, is this a reasonable analogy for entanglement, but using everyday macroscopic objects, and therefore demonstrating that entanglement is about knowledge of the observer, rather than there being some fundamental physical process "the collapse of the wavefunction" that happens upon observations? Or, maybe this is a flawed and misleading explanation that missing some key ingredient of what makes quantum entanglement fundamentally different from this classical and macroscopic scenario. I think vaguely there's something about Bell's inequality that is relevant here, but can't make it work with the analogy (i.e. add some extra details that show that the quantum version is weirder than just lazy Pizza order fulfilment).
I'm asking for understanding. I studied all this years ago, although Quantum was never my speciality. I'm getting back into thinking about this stuff via Sean Carroll's book on Many Worlds and I'm trying to wrap my head around the concepts again.